Today’s issue of Science contains the winners of the 2007 Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, and the journal’s website has an online exhibit that features all of the winning images.

The competition is co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who created it with the editors of Science five years ago. The aim of the competition is to make science comprehensible to more people, and to encourage the growth of scientific literacy, at a time in which it seems to be becoming increasingly rare.

The image above comes from a poster by aeronautical engineer David Willis and computer scientist Mykhaylo Kostandov, both of whom are at Brown University. It shows a computer simulation of the flight of the short-nosed bat (Cynopterus brachyotis), and was created from data of the movements of bats’ wings and the air around them, which was recorded by lasers and a multi-camera motion-tracking system.

Larger versions of all the winning images can be viewed at the NSF website.